The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago. That's a long time in technology!
Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors.
How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.
I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly…
Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether?
I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.
I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.
In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow.
The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.
As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.
Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.
Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors.
How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.